ABSTRACT
This chapter explores spatial and conceptual abstraction relationship between the carceral and the state, paying particular attention to the context of the new punitiveness. The wider trend towards US-style mass incarceration has triggered interest in the relative punitiveness of different countries and jurisdictions, bringing into view the relationship between incarceration and the nature of the state itself, with scholars identifying distinctive cultural, historical, constitutional, institutional and political factors that either facilitate or hinder the development of punitive policies. The carceral churn' is the repeated release, reoffending, re-sentencing and re-imprisonment of former prisoners, argued to operate to deliver the high rates of reoffending and re-imprisonment amongst prisoner populations in a variety of contexts. The chapter focuses on sites of incarceration; not as static physical entities, but as nodes in carceral networks which symbolise, represent and are experienced as, crystallisations of the penal philosophy of the prevailing state.
